Category: Music

Which Guitar?

I have two musical goals for tonight after work.

First: Put together a playlist of the songs on our potential-singer-audition-songs list so that I can start practicing the holy hell out of them.

Second: Decide which guitar I want to use for the band’s come back work. As of right now I am leaning toward the birthday Les Paul that my wife bought me for my 50th birthday almost three years ago. I’ve been playing the two 70’s Gibsons that I had all of the repair work done on since November or so, but I think I want to start the return-to-the-band process with my newest guitar.

Whatever guitar I decide to use for the band’s comeback (which is scheduled to start this coming Sunday) is going to need new strings. I have a couple of boxes here, but I might need to order some more from the Amazonians today. We’ll see.

It’s time to start focusing on getting the band running again. I’m mentally ready for it, but not quite ready from a guitar playing ability standpoint. I have a lot of rust to shake off.

These are pictures I took for today’s photo a day challenge, but they are not the guitar I am talking about. Oh well.

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Plans for Tomorrow

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday. We have one plan for the day but I have a few additional things I want to get to.

  1. Wake up and do my daily exercise
  2. Eat breakfast
  3. Grab my laptop, a microphone, a USB audio interface, and a pair of headphones and jump into the car, drive someplace quiet, and record vocals for my two songs for this month’s Record Every Month Challenge
  4. Come home and take a shower and shave
  5. Put lead guitars onto the same two songs
  6. Make lunch for me and my beloved wife
  7. Mix one of those two songs
  8. Go to my father’s for Easter Dinner. Maybe watch a couple of innings of the Red Sox game
  9. Go home, spend some quality time hanging out with my beloved wife
  10. Mix the other song
  11. Sleep

I think I can manage that.

Until then, I am worried about one of the cats. Lilly. About half an hour ago she made a ton of noise. She was running around like crazy, crashing into things and skidding all over the tiled floor. She somehow got wrapped up in a plastic bag and was absolutely freaking out trying to get untangled. She ran into the bed room where I was sitting up in bed and watching something on my laptop. She then dashed out again and went into hiding. I can’t find her anywhere. I’m worried that she might have hurt herself in her struggles. I’m worried that she might have wrapped the plastic bag around her neck. She hid herself so well though that I can’t seem to find her anywhere. I’m sure she’s okay, but I would like to find her to know for sure.

Poor kitty.

Musically Good

I was sitting in the living room working on melodies and lyrics for the two Record Every Month songs when my band’s drummer threw out a list of songs he thinks we should use for singer auditions.

I was going to kick off the discussion over the weekend if one of the other guys didn’t do it sooner. I am really glad someone did it sooner. I was starting to be nervous that maybe I was the only one of us still invested. I’m not. Hear me breathing that huge sigh of relief.

The list of songs he suggested is good. Most of what I was going to suggest is on it. A couple I wanted were not, but I can let the other guys talk me out of them. It’s all good.

Progress is a good thing.

Happy Dishwasher Day

We had a new dishwasher installed today. I am in the office so I have only seen pictures so far. I want to take it for a spin when I get home. I’ll dirty up some dishes if I need to.

I was in the office yesterday. I’ll be in the office tomorrow. Then I am at home on Friday, which is good because a plumber is coming on Friday. It never ends, kids. It never ends. Totally worth it though.

Change of subject: I watched 3 Body Problem on Netflix. I enjoyed it. I was warned that episode five was a mind blower and sure enough it was. I wonder if people who read the original books enjoyed it too. It read somewhere that it was considered to be an un-adaptable book and the fear was that people who read the book would hate the show. I wonder if that’s true. I wonder how moving much of the focus away from China would affect people’s opinions. I don’t know that I am curious enough to try and read the book, but maybe. I feel the same way about Foundation on AppleTV+. I enjoyed the show, but did I enjoy it enough to give the Azimov books a go? I don’t know.

Change of subject: This coming Sunday is Easter. Easter doesn’t have any real meaning for me anymore. Sorry, not sorry. We’ll have dinner with my father. The rest of my focus this weekend will hopefully be music. I have two songs for the March edition of Record Every Month to finish and there is a lot left to do on both of them. Here’s hoping I’ll get everything done. I won’t be distracted by the start of the Red Sox season though. Some moron decided to have Boston start the season on the West coast with all of the games being night games. That means the first handful of games this season won’t start until 10pm for Red Sox fans. Screw that.

Okay, here’s today’s bad photo a day challenge picture. No reason, just cause.

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I’ll be in the office tomorrow too so expect number 210 of 365 to be another thoughtless picture of whatever I happen to see in the cellar while doing my daily exercise at 5:00am.

We Need a Plan – Follow Up

On Sunday I wrote a post about trying to form a plan for moving forward with my band. I wrote out what I thought we might do to find a new singer and hold auditions and all of that fun stuff. I said I was going to send it to the other two guys in the band and that I would probably do it some time on Monday… then I immediately sent them what I had written. It wasn’t the next day, it was the next minute.

Both Mike the Bass Player and Kevin the Drummer agreed with all of it. The first of our singer-audition-preparation-practice will be a week from Sunday. One week after Easter. Over the intervening week and a half I’ll get the conversation started regarding which songs we should work on. I want at least five and at most 10. Enough to give potential new singers something to work with, but not enough to overwhelm us as we try to shake the rust off. We should try and be diverse in singing styles but I am thinking we should stay away from Bon Scott. Something about Greg the Former Singer allowed him to handle Bon Scott era AC/DC while most normal humans probably couldn’t deal with that high pitched screechiness. Greg didn’t sound like Bon Scott at all, yet somehow he could do it. Let’s not ask any potential new singers to go there. Okay… maybe we brush up one song just in case someone is feeling ambitious.

We also need to figure out the P.A. situation. We had a little one that was barely powerful enough to get a voice loud enough to be heard over the drums. That little dinky P.A. thing was replaced by something Greg bought. We don’t have that anymore because… ya know… it is Greg’s, not ours. Hopefully the little dinky thing still works.

So the ball will start rolling again in 12 days. I’ll likely share every single thought the three of us have as we work toward the next step. You know how it is for oversharing nerds like me.

How About a New Mix

Hey, I mixed one of the songs that I put the vocals onto yesterday and the lead guitars onto today. It’s a song from the RPM Challenge a few years ago that is now part of The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project, aka Quarantine Tunes Volume Seven.

I’m not sold on the mix, but when am I ever sold on something I’ve mixed?

More Recording

I finished recording all of the guitar tracks I wanted to do yesterday but didn’t end up having time for. Hooray!

I played through a speaker again, but unlike yesterday I had to lower the volume to a tolerable level. I had the house to myself yesterday so I could approach ear-bleeding volume. Today my wife, the love of my life Jen, is home so I had to tone it down a lot. That’s okay. It’s still more fun playing through a speaker than playing direct into the computer.

I put rhythm guitars onto one song for the Record Every Month Challenge, and lead guitars onto three songs for my re-recording old songs project, aka The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project, or also aka Quarantine Tunes.

My leads weren’t good, but they were better than most of the stuff I’ve recorded of late.

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Dig the blurry light on the amplifier!
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We Need a Plan

I need to fix what’s left of my band. I don’t know how. I think we need to come up with a plan. Something we can work through that will result in getting everything moving again.

We need a singer. I tried craigslist and got a surprising number of responses, but we weren’t organized enough to act on any of it. Here’s what I am going to suggest to the other two guys…

  • The three of us pick a handful of songs. Maybe 5-10. They will be our singer-audition songs.
  • The three of us start practicing again. Once a week. We rehearse the holy hell out of those 5-10 songs for a month or so, maybe a little longer. We get them to where we can play them in our sleep.
  • We put up another craigslist add. This one will have the responses forwarded to all three of us. If anyone answers the add we immediately schedule an audition. We give them the list of songs and give them a week, two weeks tops, to work on them and then we all get together.
  • Eventually we offer the job to one of two people and then we’re off and running.

I am going to send this list to Mike the Bass Player and Kevin the Drummer, probably tomorrow at some point. Hopefully they’ll be up for it and we can get things moving in the right direction again.

Music Day Recap

Okay, so how much music did I work on today? I already mentioned in a previous post that I put vocals onto three songs and bass guitar (MIDI) onto one. After posting that update, I added bass and drums (both MIDI) to one song and rhythm guitars to three.

That’s not even close to what I was hoping to get to today, but I’ll take it. The guitar tracks I recorded used my Fender Deluxe Reverb at a slightly, borderline absurd volume. It was louder than my usual gig volume… and it was awesome.

When I pick up where I left off I will have to go back to direct signal out of the amps into the USB interface. It’s still fun and it still sounds good, but it’s not as fun. It’s not as epic. It’s not as awesome.

Maybe more tomorrow? Maybe some car vocals? We’ll see.

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Musical Suffering

I haven’t played guitar yet today but it’s still on the agenda. What I have done is sing… a lot. I have been working on The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project this morning.

Remember all of those posts over the last couple of weeks where I complained about having a really bad cold? I am more or less over it now but I learned that singing seems to amplify the symptoms.

Sing a line, cough like crazy, blow my nose, repeat ad nauseam. It’s crazy. I don’t feel sick at all but I can’t stop coughing and I can’t stop needing to blow my nose. It’s all singing’s fault. I have managed to put vocals on three songs this morning but I have to take a break. My throat is killing me. I put a bass part onto one song too but that didn’t cause me any physical pain. That’s good at least.

I am going to take a break for a bit and then go get my hair cut and get an oil change. Then I will come home, do one more vocal part and a couple more bass parts, then I will play some guitar, then I will do some more vocal tracks.

Crazy day, kids. Crazy, crazy day.

My wife, Jen, is at a conference today. I miss her a lot.